Back in February, the government said that its $787
billion stimulus bill would create 3.5 million new jobs. This
was at the very highest end of the Congressional Budget
Office’s (CBO) estimate of 1.2 to 3.6 million new jobs.
But even this high-end estimate of US job creation is
penny-ante, when compared to a leaked memo from Gordon
Brown, the prime minister of the United Kingdom. He
proposed a $2 trillion European stimulus plan that was
supposedly going to create 19 million jobs. In other words,
Europe can create a new job with just $105,000 of
government spending, while the US needs $219,000.
But all of this is just a pipe dream. Government
spending does not cause a net increase in jobs over the long
run; it costs jobs. Every dollar the government spends is
either taxed or borrowed from the private sector, which
means it “crowds out” private sector job creation. And
because government spending is less efficient than private
sector spending the economy actually grows more slowly in
the long run as the government gets bigger.
What’s interesting is how all these numbers are being
bandied about with very little pushback from the press. In
recent years, the press has complained loudly about “$200
billion deficits as far as the eye can see.” And almost all the
press argued that budget deficits lifted interest rates and hurt
the economy. But in recent weeks, the press seems to have
forgotten its old argument.
This is especially frightening when the US now faces $1
trillion deficits. President Obama says that this is all OK,
and that he is cutting the deficit in half (to $533 billion using
administration math, or $672 billion according to the CBO)
in just four years. What he doesn’t say, and what no one
seems willing to say, is that without his new budget the
deficit would have been cut by 75% in four years to about
$250 billion. The budget deficit and the size of the
government are exploding and no one seems to care.
But it doesn’t end there. Americans are the most
generous people on the face of the earth (when measured in
dollars donated to charities). At the same time, private
charity does a great deal of good and often does it more
effectively than government. But now the government wants
to limit deductions for charitable contributions.
Some conservatives have argued that this might be a
good trade off if marginal tax rates were lowered. They
argue that the benefits of higher GDP (resulting from lower
tax rates) would outweigh the losses from slimmer donations
(as a share of income). That is an economic argument that
reasonable people can disagree about.
But this time around, the government wants to limit the
charitable deduction